Marie-Ève Signeyrole, what’s the connection between Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and the topical issue of refugees and migration? The symphony was politically charged ever since its creation in 1812: it was seen as an “anti-Napoleon symphony”, a kind of victory celebration. Was that at all relevant to you?

Not in any concrete sense of Napoleonic references. For me, though, the spectre of war is very present. When I listen to it, it conjures up images of people being hunted down, of bombed-out cities on fire. But I don’t see our work in BABY DOLL as a political commentary so much as a living tool with which to brighten people’s awareness. Not to stir feelings of pity amongst the audience but rather to share the perspective of people over whose bodies international conflicts have played out. In the spirit of Beethoven’s humanism, too, I want to shine a spotlight on the journey made by migrants to Europe. I want to trigger a shared emotion. Unfortunately, you can’t come close to talking about “victory” or “victory celebration”. More than anything else, you have a tough battle on your hands if you want to get through, by which I mean get to the country you’re aiming for and get through to the collective awareness of Europe.

How did you come to work with Yom, the klezmer musician? How did rehearsals go?

It was pure bliss working with him. An inner need, I’d say. His music is about migrations, nomadism, uprootedness. When you’re grappling with a Beethoven work, there are going to be harmonies on the one hand, but also discordant tones. The idea was to create a work of art that speaks on behalf of all the disappeared whose names we will never know. The music conveys a notion of two continents in conversation, fighting, reconciling, betraying each other. I started off with a prefabricated vision of the evening and Yom added his musical proposals, so we had a kind of ping-pong thing going on in which we built the musical framework, until we got to the third phase, doing rehearsals where we were improvising live with very sensitive musicians. We ended up with a living, breathing structure where every performance sounds different. I knew Yom from his albums and because he moves between styles like I do – klezmer, electro, classical and contemporary – and, like me, he loves creating worlds from that mix and looking for lines joining music and spirituality.

 

Why did you choose the title BABY DOLL for a piece about people fleeing their country under duress?

I wanted a title that plays with the theme of migration but not with the actual word. The “Baby Doll” title conjures up many images, things like Elia Kazan’s scandalous film from 1956, the tale of a young girl who gets seduced by an old man. The title refers to the large number of very young women embarking on their journey to Europe. “Baby Doll” is a doll in the literal sense of the word. The women are often so young that they might just as well pack their dolls as well when preparing for their journey. “Baby Doll” is the nightie that they use to create the impression that they are pregnant, thereby making themselves less of a prospect to potential rapists. The term also refers to a child born during the journey or a foetus in the womb of a woman in transit. 20 percent of the women are pregnant, or fall pregnant, during their journey. “Baby Doll” is a term that evokes lightness or levity but in reality has a darker side to it – and an aftertaste of cynicism and irony.

80 million people are currently on the move from their countries of origin according to numbers released by the UNHCR at the end of June. Those are unprecedented figures. Why is BABY DOLL primarily about women? After all, women make up a small minority of migrants.

Women have a much harder time finding their voice than men – and when they do, they are listened to even less. In addition to the violence that they will encounter on the way and the physical exhaustion, they usually have much less money. They don’t receive the same resources from their families. Over and above the normal dangers, they are exposed to threats from male migrants and male people smugglers. There has been far too little attention paid to the world of migrating women, and it’s a complex subject that I’m totally occupied with at the moment. I understand that Europe can’t open its arms to the entire world, but we’ve got to start taking a long, hard look at it and how we want it to be. The people gathering outside the gates to Europe have no choice in the matter. And anyway, if you read the statistics, you read that globally Africa is the biggest host to refugees. Europe is not the destination of, or at the centre of, all migratory movements, as we Europeans tend to believe.

What do you see BABY DOLL as? Is it a staged concert, an opera, a piece of musical theatre?

The production has more to do with theatre than with opera. The idea was to make a fictionalised account of real-life events. The piece takes an entirely documentary-style approach, like a TV report. The eye-witness accounts that I collected and transcribed resulted in a story that has now become the story of a single woman on stage. Then there are two other levels that I would also describe as documentary-style – the real numbers reflecting the migration situation today, which are projected on a screen, and then at the level of the music, which conveys feeling and truth in its own universal way. There’s a documentary element to all my work. I spent a lot of time researching the subject. Before I wrote the libretto to my “Soupe populaire” production I spend months dispensing soup and chatting with homeless people. For “SexY” I spoke with young people about their idea of love, which is often an abstract construct that plays out at several removes from their body, somewhere between lack of commitment, uncertainty, Tinder and screen-based relations. It’s important to me that the words in my libretti are true and taken from real life. But I also adore works by classical authors. Setting everything in dialogue form is exciting. I love the freedom associated with fusing old music with modern-day language. By having Yom use his clarinet to communicate with Beethoven, I’m kind of restoring to Beethoven a contemporary language. The shock of two musical periods colliding is fascinating to me. When boundaries become porous, a new richness is the result. In my opinion, that’s a topical issue in the world we live in today. It’s so easy for us to communicate that we get the impression that access to everything is allowed, whereas in actual fact the borders are as insurmountable as they’ve ever been. That’s another theme raised in BABY DOLL.

How did you come across the stories of the migrant women?

By chance I stumbled on the story of an Eritrean woman which really affected me. Since then I’ve done a lot of research into women who have made it to Europe or who never arrived at all. And with the help of a Parisian NGO, “Samu Social”, I met a lot of women. BABY DOLL is what I distilled out of those encounters. I couldn’t bring myself to narrate the story of one particular woman and pass it off as the pure truth. No one knows what’s true and what’s false anyway. Many women are forced to tell tales in order to come to Europe. They lie about their age, where they come from, their support systems, about what has happened to them. The more we talked, the more it turned out that their real stories were much worse – and European administrative records are simply not in a position to give them the articulation they deserve. Another terrible thing is that even if they wanted to speak the truth, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They’re neither mentally in a place where they could describe the extent of the horrors, nor are the records able to capture the details adequately. At some point or other in the writing of the libretto I said to myself: At the end of the day, whether a story is true or not true is not really what’s important. Both types of narrative convey a version of the truth.

 

How did you manage to get so close up and intimate with the women?

“Samu Social” has set up a centre precisely for women in precarious situations, for women who are alone, often with children but without husbands, companions or contacts. Many of them were prepared to talk to me. In fact, I got the impression they needed the outlet. Their only other contact with the outside world was with French government administrators, not exactly the most sensitive people for the kind of experiences they want to talk about. They can’t speak the truth there. Mostly it’s men who do the talking anyway. When they arrive, they’re totally cut off from society, living in a parallel universe, often without papers, can’t use public transport, and so on. My inquiries were warmly received. I had no rejections.

Can you give any examples? Which of the women left a particular impression? Are you still in contact?

Oh yes, of course. I’m very close to Bamousso from Côte d’Ivoire. She’ll be travelling to Berlin and will come on stage at the end. I met up with her in a café in Paris. She wouldn’t normally go to a place like that. She had her little daughter on her back. She didn’t order anything because she has diabetes. Her daughter had never eaten ice cream. Two worlds colliding. First, she gave me some tips on how to massage my baby with shea butter if it gets a stomach ache. It was nice that she was advising me and not the other way around. Her story is really brutal. She left her country as there were no medicines for her condition. Her mother had passed away, so people advised her to leave Côte d’Ivoire, but it was a trap. Along with a group of other women they were tricked to go into the forest, where they were raped for days on end. She managed to escape and someone told her she’d get help in France. But for women, the monetary currency, the medium of exchange, is their body. Unlike the men, women get no money from their family, so she was raped on multiple occasions. She tells the story as if it were a little anecdote, with no tears, no emotion. It’s more like a cold fact: she paid for her survival with her body. And before that happened, she was a virgin. In Turkey a woman asked her to take her son to his father, who was already living in Paris, but the boat capsized. She managed to get the boy back on the boat, but when the others crowded back onto the boat, the boy suffocated. She was rocking him as if he was still alive, but the others wanted him off the boat because there wasn’t enough room, so she had to give the child up. I’ll spare you the end of the story. She got to Paris and found a place in a women’s refuge. So that she had the right to stay there she asked a man in France if he would make her pregnant. Because of her little daughter she is now permitted to stay. On the day of the lockdown, when the premiere should have taken place, she moved to stay with her sister, who lives close to Hanover. Bamousso’s learning German and trying to find work. Up on stage she makes a statement to the effect that she still hasn’t phoned the boy’s father, because she can’t bring herself to tell him that his son perished.

What effect did it have on Bamousso, seeing her story being depicted on stage?

Many of the women’s tales of flight and escape have been distilled into Bamousso’s story. In Metz she took part in the final rehearsal and it was pretty intense. She often said how good it felt to have her story represented in this way. Sometimes our artistic distance to the events made her laugh. In any case, she was totally swept away by the orchestra playing Beethoven, being from another musical tradition which uses different instruments. At the beginning she couldn’t get any words out on stage, she was too choked up, but there came a point where she was ready to give it a go. If ever during a performance she finds she’s not up to it, we always have the recording of her voice. The choice is always hers.

Is it not the case, though, that you are still a white, European director in a position of power, acting as mouthpiece for a much less privileged, black woman without a voice? Are you not helping to perpetuate a certain power relationship?

I’m very happy to have this power and to be wielding it in the way I am. I define myself as Bamousso’s instrument, through which she is able to tell her story. I’m letting myself be used by her so that she can speak her words to the world. I have the means with which to persuade institutions to spend money so that people who would not normally have a means of articulation are given a voice. I’m not forcing Bamousso to come on stage at the end and deliver her speech. I’m giving her the option, and it’s up to her what she chooses to do on any given evening. Quite apart from that, although I was born in Paris, I don’t really feel particularly Parisian. My mother is Algerian and so a kind of migrant. She’s a journalist writing for an Algerian newspaper. Obviously it’s not the same, but I still know a little about what it is to be an outsider.

Wouldn’t Bamousso ideally have received the kind of training that would equip her to be a director herself?

Yes, you’re right. But structures and institutions change at a very slow pace. Slowly but surely, more women are being given managerial positions, and diversity is increasing. The good things about a law stipulating that women must make up a minimum proportion of the workforce might also work with a legal minimum imposed on the number of refugees allowed in. In my view, change must be managed by rules that ensure certain shares of representation. I’m in touch with so many migrants who know the culture of my own country so much better than I do, because migrants pick up things twice as fast. The cultural and political landscape is changing; the mixing of people is a positive thing. My power is as a mediator. I feel an inner duty to speak up for people who are not heard as often as they should be. But the gain is a two-way street. When I did “Soupe populaire”, I realised that homeless people didn’t necessarily come to get a meal; some were escaping loneliness. But what struck me most was that the wealthy Catholics from the 5th arrondissement, who were dishing out the soup, were also extremely lonely and their stints in the soup kitchen made their winter evenings so much cheerier. One loneliness responds to another. People get just as much pleasure out of giving as they do receiving – thankfully, otherwise humanity would be in a sorry state. I don’t think you have to be black to relate the story of a black woman. I think you can be old and still tell a story about a baby, or that a child can still converse with an elderly person. On a basic level I think speaking up only for yourself is rather uninteresting. The question of whether only Bamousso has the right to talk about Bamousso may be of some interest, but at the end of the day it’s a question asked by a rich and privileged woman. Who is allowed to speak about whom? Asking if that is legitimate is ridiculous! The stories have to be told, because women like Bamousso are not at present in a position to tell them. But I’m sure that more and more of them will be given the opportunity to express themselves.

 

In France the author and Prix Goncourt winner Leila Slimani sparked a debate about privilege when she released a dreamy, poetic “diary” written at her upper-class country house during the Corona lockdown. Where did you spend that period?

I was at home with my one-year-old son in the St Denis district of Paris-Montreuil, partly so I could look after my mother, who’s deemed at-risk. Montreuil is an area that was hit hard by Corona, because it’s home to a lot of poor families and migrants. Even though my family does have a place in the country, I felt it was the responsible thing to stay home. I had been working shortly before that and wasn’t sure who I’d been in contact with. What shocked me most about the pandemic was the way a government suddenly grounded the entire population and offered no other response apart from that. I found it a pretty violent response, curbing me in my freedom to do the most basic things. Everything that’s been going on in France for months – the yellow vest protests, the strike over the pension reform, the pandemic – has been the subject of drastic state control measures. I’m getting a little sick of the way democratic expression is being clamped down on. I see France currently in the grip of a security machine that is coming increasingly to resemble a dictatorship. I find it worrying – and I belong to the privileged class. How people are doing who don’t have as many options as I do doesn’t bear thinking about. Alone the fact that you’re not allowed to go for a walk. In my view it had reached such a level of absurdity, the exact opposite of common sense. If you ask me, the repercussions of the lockdown in France are going to be huge in some areas. I would have welcomed being told by the state during Corona to adjust my patterns of consumption, be more sustainable, rather than being told to stay at home and not go out. I get the impression that people in Germany are given more rein to take responsibility for their own actions. France has this absurd state apparatus that seems to stick up only for the Haves, never for the Have Nots. There should be think tanks for this, civic councils that are representative and look at the different interests people have. I look at what the Paris Opera is going through, faced with enormous losses this season. First the staff downed tools because of the pension reform and two hours of work. Now they may be losing their jobs completely. What I mean is, no one is ever happy and content, however privileged he or she is. It makes it difficult to find a solution that works for everyone. I say that as a woman of privilege, who is not affluent but still has a job, a family, friends, a roof over her head and isn’t running for her life like a third of the world’s population. We always look at the world from the point we’re at, which means most Parisians, privileged or not, have no idea what people who are fleeing their country might be going through. Most of us live in blissful ignorance of what 80 million people face on a daily basis.

Do you think Beethoven is suited to telling this story? Do you believe in the power of music to spark a cathartic response to horrific stories?

Yes, music is hugely powerful. I work in opera, an extremely privileged world, a fictional world, utterly divorced from reality. So I think it’s enormously important to tell stories from our present-day perspective. Music has the power to transcend epochs, to take us on flights of concentrated emotion that are common to all ages. The voices and instruments preserve timeless feelings. The great opera stories tell of universal conflicts. I see myself as a kind of ambassador, coupling together our modern-day thoughts with the music of yesteryear. The power of instrumental music lies in the fact that it creates its own weapons. It can transport so much. It contains within it all the invisible people setting off on a journey, the sea that engulfs them, the cold wind of the desert night, the sinking bodies. It evokes images of high fences in front of them, inhuman jails, incomprehensible words from the mouths of functionaries, a guilty Europe, fear of the unknown…

What have you done with the four different movements of the 7th Symphony, which range from devotional to forceful?

The first movement, “Poco sostenuto. Vicace”, is dedicated to the migrant from Africa. The second movement is the musical backdrop to the thoughts of a European having to flee her country to escape an epidemic or climate catastrophe in the year 2050. So I’ve got two perspectives running parallel, as a way of showing how arbitrarily the accidents of birth are shared around. On 13th March, the day of the scheduled premiere in Metz, this story of this privileged white woman suddenly acquired a hyperreality – a very strange situation. Suddenly the second section of the work, which in fact is quite anecdotal, took on a completely different significance. The piece is continually asking the question: what would it be like, if we privileged white people had to up stakes and run? And suddenly we’re hemmed inside our four walls by a virus. The danger that continues to menace us today is contained in the work, as it were, for the migrant woman from Africa as much as for the European. And as all the performances were cancelled, we’re gathered here at the Deutsche Oper Berlin for the world premiere.

Wagner once called the 7th Symphony the “apotheosis of dance”. How does that sit with BABY DOLL?

Dance is at the core of my production. The three performers are dancers and the live cam, too, has its own kind of dance going on. The camera is never switched off, the performers are in full view the whole time, the props mistress builds the set, the musicians are on the move, too. It’s as if we are shooting the journey and filming the making-of at the same time. It’s one big dance. I’m not actually a choreographer. I haven’t developed any kind of choreographic signature of my own. But I know how to draw expressiveness from the bodies of performers, how to get them to tell a story even before any words are uttered. And another reason why I’m using dancers to describe the journey of these women is that the journey is nothing if not physically tiring, a continual struggle to survive, a heroic wrestle with the body and mind. And the second idea behind BABY DOLL is to take the audience members on this journey to the centre of torture. It’s an exercise in empathy, getting them to truly feel – even though we are far, far removed from the horror that women experience on the way to Europe.